Morgan Friedman: Hello everyone, once again, to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have the one and only Mike Montague with me today. How are you today, Mike?
Mike Montague: Great to be here. I have been looking forward to this one, and I’m excited to talk about one of my all-time favorite stories.
Morgan Friedman: You know, with that buildup, I can’t wait any longer. Tell us one of your all-time favorite stories. I have my coffee.
Mike Montague: It’s about 20 years old now, which is crazy to think, but in about 2005, I was working at a retro radio station in Kansas City called E105, playing music from retro to right now. And I was Romeo. I was the prize guy for the radio station, and I also kind of worked nights and weekends and stuff on the air in the studio. And we were sponsoring a Billy Idol concert at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City. And again, this is like 2005, so it’s mostly like soccer moms. That’s our audience, the people that are listening. And his opening act—
Morgan Friedman: I don’t think I’ve heard Billy Idol since my bar mitzvah.
Mike Montague: Well, it’s probably a great tangent that you jumped in on, because I forget now, after 20 years, that he was old at that point. He was about 20, 30 years into his career at that point. And now kids, if any of them listen to this show, have no idea who Billy Idol is, but we’re talking Mony Mony, White Wedding, Rebel Yell. He’s one of the most recognizable rock stars on the planet from the 80s, I would say. And not to jump too far into the story, but if you see him in person, you’re like, “This is a rock star.” It’s black leather jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket, bright yellow spiky hair, and he’s got a British accent, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is the man. This is a rock star, and this is what it looks like.” But we jumped ahead. So his opening act got sick, and they called the radio station, because we were promoting the show, and said, “Hey, do you have anybody that could play some music for like an hour before Billy Idol goes on, because now we’ve got an hour to kill. We don’t want to change the time and move the show up. We don’t want to open the gates late and have people sitting outside for an hour. We just need somebody to kill time.” They asked me because I was one of the only DJs that actually played in front of an audience. Most people don’t think about this, but most radio DJs are introverts. They’re like podcasters. They want to sit in a room by themselves. They want to tell a funny joke, tell an interesting story, and do their thing. They don’t want any feedback. They don’t want any actual human interaction. So I was the only one at the studio who actually had the equipment and skill set to go play live music for people. So I got asked to do it. I was like, “Yeah, great.” A couple hundred bucks, not bad for the time, and an autographed picture of Billy Idol. And I get to promote this on my resume and get in front of about 5,000 people. So I was excited to do it. It was going to be a fun opportunity, and we could broadcast from the—how could you say no to something so exciting?
Morgan Friedman: How could you say no to something so exciting?
Mike Montague: It sounds pretty good, right? Are you with me so far? This is all in.
Morgan Friedman: I’m all in. I’m excited to see what happens. What happens next?
Mike Montague: Well, we’re on the Client Horror Stories podcast, but we’re not quite there yet. I meet with Billy Idol and his manager before the show, which was super cool. I’m like, “Awesome, I’m going to get to meet this rock star.” He walks around the corner like I said.
Morgan Friedman: Before the show, meaning right before you went on, or like a few weeks?
Mike Montague: No, no, no. Like an hour before the show. His person got sick that day. They called the radio station during the day. They said, “Can you go on at seven tonight?” I’m like, “Sure, I’ll just jump in and do it.” Met with him about an hour before the show and set up my equipment. And they said, “Look, three things. It’s a Billy Idol show, so don’t play any Billy Idol songs. We’ll save those for later. Number two, it’s a rock show, so play mostly rock music. But number three, you’re on the retro radio station, so whatever you play on the radio is fine. Just don’t go too crazy with country music or anything like that.” I was like, perfect, I can do that.
Morgan Friedman: All those seem reasonable.
Mike Montague: Yeah, reasonable requests. And I’m thinking, this is a soccer mom audience. I know my audience at this point. I’d been DJing for five or six years and hundreds of shows. And soccer moms at this age—you’re thinking, you’re of similar age to me—Jessie’s Girl, 867-5309. Jenny, you know.
Morgan Friedman: Exactly, 867-5309.
Mike Montague: Yeah. I’m like, they’re going to love this, right?
Morgan Friedman: You’re bringing back the whole bar mitzvah, when-you’re-13 era parties.
Mike Montague: Yeah. Bust out the Wham, bust out all the good stuff. Material Girl and Vogue are going to crush.
I’m like, I’ve got this. So I skip forward. Great, deal set up, I start on stage playing. People start coming in. It’s all going great. I’m playing those types of songs. And about 15 minutes in, the manager comes out on stage, where I’m on stage in the middle of a song, and he says, “I thought we said play rock music, like the Rolling Stones.” And that’s when my heart sank, because I didn’t realize that Billy Idol saw himself as a classic rock artist, not an 80s rock artist. He started in the 70s, not the 80s. And I was thinking about the audience, not the person hiring me to do the job. And here’s where it went to my client horror story.
Morgan Friedman: Before we get to the horror part, let’s unpack what you just said, because I think you made some deep and interesting points. One point is this realization you had in this high-stress moment—the manager coming out in front of thousands of people—that how people define themselves is often very different than how others define them. And you always need to use the definition of the one paying your bills.
Mike Montague: Yes, exactly. That was one of the things I wanted to share with everybody today, because I learned this in my marketing career, in graphic design too. I was making a big sign for an apartment complex. It was a full-color sign, huge, like 12 by 30 feet wide. And we have full color, so I’m thinking, “Oh, I can add people at the apartment complex, a happy shot of the interior, do some cool gradients and fonts.” And they were like, “We want it bright yellow with big black letters. Now leasing.” And I was like, “It’s your sign. We have full colors, but I could do something really cool.” And they’re like, “No, we want to see it from space.” And I had to make one of the ugliest, biggest signs I’ve ever made, one that could be seen from the highway. I’m working. It’s not my sign. It’s not my building. It’s not my project.
Morgan Friedman:You need to make the one paying you happy. There’s another lesson in there, an even more subtle one, that I want to point out, and then we’ll get back to what happened next. It’s fascinating that you, like me, see Billy Idol as an 80s bar-music genre kind of artist, when he sees himself as a classic rocker from the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin era. And that’s really interesting to think about, because the first thing that comes to mind is there’s this great 70s rock band—you were a DJ, not me, so you know more about these things than I do—Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit—and then the 80s came, and they went into cheesy stuff like “We Built the City” on rock.
Mike Montague: I actually know all of these. I think I’m going to argue with you here, but I think they got better. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is one of the worst songs of all time, in my opinion.
Morgan Friedman: Maybe, Maybe. I didn’t hear what you said, sorry to interrupt you. But before we get back to it, for our listeners, I think the interesting thing is that when they had this change, the band changed their name—and you’ll know more about it than I will. So, I always think about like Jefferson Airplane.
Mike Montague: That’s what I was going to say. They rebranded. So White Rabbit was Jefferson Airplane. Then they did Jefferson Starship, and then they lost the Jefferson and just became Starship, which was when we got “We Built the City.”
Morgan Friedman: We built the city. Cool. To me, that’s such a good example of changing genres, from seeing themselves as a hard rocker to pop. But the interesting thing is they were self-conscious about it, and they realized it. So they changed their name and branding to go along with the genre shift. Billy Idol, on the other hand, never had a rebranding, a genre and name change. It was just always Billy Idol, which implies, “Yeah, I’m always this hard rocker. Always have been, always will be.”
Mike Montague: And that’s what I find interesting about it too—when I step back from it now, 20 years later, you’re like, “Yeah, Billy Idol’s been known as the rebel, the hardcore guy”—even though he was popular in 80s pop, he was always known for being badass and wearing the black leather, and his brand was the rebel. So that was the part I didn’t understand.
So, back to the story. This is when my heart sank, and I knew I was going to fail when he said Rolling Stones, because this is 2005, before Wi-Fi, before I could download anything. The only songs I had to play were the CDs I brought with me, and I DJ’d in bars and clubs, and bars and clubs don’t play a lot of Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. There are like two rock songs you can dance to—”You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me”—straight from the bar mitzvah circuit. So I play those two songs, and I’m frantically flipping through all my CDs, looking for a jock jams compilation or something with some rock on it. I found one Rolling Stones song—I think it was “Emotional Rescue” or something—one of their cheesiest disco songs. I played that, and I was like, “All right, I made it 15 minutes, I played three rock songs.” They said I could mix in other songs. I’m going to have to play something else, because I’ve still got half an hour left in this show, and I know I’m going to run out. So I mix in one I know the audience will like, and I keep frantically looking for other rock songs. So I played KC and the Sunshine Band. “Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight”—because I like to make the joke, not in that order. We’re going to save the making love for the end of the night, but feel free to get down or do a little dance, we’re all here to have fun. I play the song, and about 30 seconds in, the lights come down, the sound comes down. I’m standing on stage in front of thousands of people, and nothing—my board, my microphone, nothing works. I look over to the side, and the manager just does the cutthroat sign and says, “You’re done.” And, wow, got fired live on stage by Billy Idol in front of thousands of people.
Morgan Friedman: Wow.
Mike Montague: I love telling this story, because I did not collect my $200, or my autographed picture of Billy Idol. I collected my equipment, got the hell out of there as fast as possible, ran around front, saw my radio friends, and they’re like, “You’re done early?” And I was like, “Yep, do the broadcast, do my thing.” But I love telling the story, because that’s the moment I became bulletproof as a performer. From now on, going on this podcast, going on a business stage—I’ve been maced by police, I’ve done shows on 9/11, that was before that, I’ve done all kinds of crazy things since then—but I know that whatever happens in a customer service training session in front of a thousand people is not going to be worse than being fired by Billy Idol. Well, I love it. It’s an ultimate confidence builder.
Morgan Friedman: There’s an early 19th-century German thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer—he’s something like a modern stoic, and I remember reading some of his works in college. He has this observation: every morning you should wake up and imagine yourself eating a live frog that day. Just picture it, get ready. And the reason for this exercise is that on almost every day of your life, you’re not going to eat a live frog. Therefore, the day will finish, and you’re like, “Wow, it was a great day. I was fully ready and prepared to do this terrible, horrible thing, and it didn’t happen, so I had a great day.” And on the other hand, if it happens to be the day something truly horrible happens—like you eat a frog—guess what? You’re already prepared for it. And when you’re emotionally prepared for terrible things, it’s a lot less bad. And that’s the first thing I think of when you tell your story, because now that something this humiliating and embarrassing happened to you, it’s like you’ve already eaten a live frog. So nothing else that can happen today is going to be as bad as that. So you’re going to have a great day.
Mike Montague: Definitely on stage. And I think there’s a certain amount of exposure therapy—that’s what I call it. If you’re afraid of spiders, get covered in spiders. After that, it’s never going to be that bad again f or the rest of your life. I think there’s also this interesting thing where people think confidence comes from successes. I’ve had a lot of really good events too. I opened for Frankie Valli, later, in front of like 10,000-plus people at another place in Kansas City, and I rocked it, I crushed it. It was a breathtaking moment for me—literally, I tried to talk, took a deep breath in, and was like, “Nope, I’ve got to play another song and get ready before I do this, because this is overwhelming.” It was super fun, but that one didn’t give me as much confidence as the Billy Idol one, because I knew now that I could go through hard stuff and survive it. When you just have all successes and all wins, you get impostor syndrome. You get this feeling like, “I’m not that good, it’s not always going to be like this, when is the shoe going to drop, I don’t deserve this much success, something is going to go wrong here, something doesn’t feel right, because I’ve gotten all green lights.” But when you hit the red lights and get past them, that’s when you go, “Oh, okay, I can do this.” And that’s why, every time I get a chance to tell the story to young people, I tell them, “Go fail as much as you can.” I’ve done shows for less than three people. I’ve done really great shows for more than 10,000. I’ve bombed. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. I’ve had panic attacks. I’ve had diarrhea. I’ve had everything you could possibly have happen over thousands of performances. That’s what makes you better, and that’s what makes you more confident.
Morgan Friedman: By the way, speaking of classic rock, your story reminds me of a lyric I really liked when I was a kid, from Janis Joplin’s song “Me and Bobby McGee,” where she has this line—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. So in that same vein, once you’ve lost the biggest thing—like this huge Billy Idol humiliation in public—you’re like, “Now I can really be free.” Like I’ve lost it. Nothing this bad is going to happen. So let’s rock on.
Mike Montague: Yeah, there’s definitely an ego death there, which is helpful, and it frees you up a lot to do that. And I found—that’s what comedians always talk about with bombing too. You go, “Oh, okay, I’ve done this so many times that I’m pretty much doing the same show, the same show I already know works.” So that means it’s not me. So I got past the ego part, but now whether it succeeds or fails is not me. Oftentimes I’m playing a role. I’m reading a script somebody else gave me, for a commercial or something. I don’t care whether people like this commercial or not. My job is to do my best show, my best performance, and then whether people like it has nothing to do with me. It has more to do with them than with what I’m doing, because I know other people liked this exact show.
Morgan Friedman: Right. By the way, our conversation is making me update one of my little theories that I often think about and share, which is that confidence seems to come from one of two places: either having really good options, or having deep belief. If you have an amazing option—an amazing plan B—you’ll be crazy confident. Or you have such a deep belief—whatever, “Jesus is watching me,” with your whole heart, body, and spirit—then, of course, you feel bulletproof. But this conversation is making me realize there’s a third place confidence comes from: having bombed so much that you’ve got nothing left to lose. Once you’ve been through so much pain or humiliation or embarrassment, you’re like, “Who cares?” And that’s another source of confidence.
Mike Montague: I think the other one is just ignorance and bluster. There are plenty of people who are confident and have no reason to be, or don’t truly believe in themselves.
Morgan Friedman: I think deep beliefs lead to confidence. That doesn’t mean your deep beliefs are true. Maybe Jesus is watching you, maybe he’s not, I have no opinion—that’s my opinion.
Mike Montague: I will say you’ve gotten to another part that I love to share with people when I talk about performing, which is that I think a lot of people have the mistaken belief that all performers are confident. And something else interesting happened
Morgan Friedman: Please.
Mike Montague: So, two thoughts here. One, when they shut my music off, they put on house music for the next 30 minutes, which I was like, there’s no way that’s better than what I was doing, objectively. They basically just killed time, and it had nothing to do with rock music. If they’d put on the Rolling Stones in the background, I would have felt better about it. Two, I think there’s a lesson here—from Billy Idol’s perspective, I could see it one of two ways. Either he didn’t have the confidence to go perform after this, and he was afraid I was going to lose the audience or make him look bad, or he was really confident in the brand he had, knew what did and didn’t fit into the show he was trying to put on, and made a great, gutsy call in the middle of it to not allow something to happen that was going to tarnish his brand. So I kind of see it both ways.
Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting. I wonder if, from his point of view, it was about tarnishing his brand—was this a brand management thing? Or, on the other hand, if you’re an artist—and I’m an artsy guy myself, I at least see myself that way, and I have a lot of artsy friends—the artsy people I know are so perfectionist. I could see any musician friend of mine, not famous, just playing local jazz clubs, and if someone opening for them felt embarrassingly mismatched—let’s say a jazz performer having a rap musician performing before him—he’d be like, “No way is that guy performing before me,” for pure artistic reasons.
Mike Montague: I think that’s probably the answer, in my head, because it was a disco song that got me fired. And again, looking back at it now with hindsight, playing a disco song at a Billy Idol show is probably not a great call. It was a client horror story for sure. But I can also see how I got there—I did the math in my head, what I had available, what we’d set up. So we didn’t talk about client expectations.
Morgan Friedman: Good point. Good point.
Mike Montague: Rolling back to what they said—they gave some pretty clear things, but what they did was give you an out by saying, “Anything you play on the radio is fine,” and I don’t think they had any idea what you played on the retro radio station.
Morgan Friedman: So I love your observation on client expectations. I’ll add to that: even based on what they did tell you—the second thing they told you is it’s a rock show, but the word “rock” is so ambiguous. There’s this overlap between rock and pop, which is probably where Billy Idol sits. You can probably think of a borderline musician who could be classified as both rock and pop.
Mike Montague: I’ve thought about this a lot since then, probably more than I should have. Aerosmith is the closest one that comes to mind. Aerosmith was also a 70s rock band that had pop hits in the 80s, even into the 90s. And if I had played, I don’t know whether that would have fit the rock show he was talking about or not. I would imagine not if he was using Rolling Stones as the example.
Morgan Friedman: That’s actually a good example, because there’s the Aerosmith of the “Sweet Emotion” era, which is pure classic rock, but then there’s also—this is going to reveal my age from high school—the Aerosmith of “Janie’s Got a Gun,” which is much poppier, let’s say. They’re a great example of how everyone has a different definition of where rock starts and pop begins. Maybe I think a song is too poppy, but you think it’s classic rock all the way. There’s no universe in which your definition of “it’s a rock show, so play rock music” would be identical to mine.
Mike Montague: This applies to everything—art, graphic design, professional writing, any kind of creative work—you’ve got to agree on what the terms mean. We talk about this a lot in sales training. Even if somebody says, “I want it soon”—what does “soon” mean? Does that mean this afternoon? Does it mean by the end of the year? We have no idea what the word “soon” means in their mind unless we clarify it. And especially in that genre of rock—who knows whether Bon Jovi is considered a rock star or a pop star, or some weird kind of mix where a lot more rock music was.
Morgan Friedman: I actually have strong opinions on that one. There are a couple of genres from my childhood where the name of the genre has been forgotten. When I was in high school, there was this big genre—which I was embarrassingly a fan of—that we used to call hair metal, and Bon Jovi is the canonical hair metal band, along with Poison.
Mike Montague: I love it.
Morgan Friedman: Yeah. And another genre that’s been lost by name, but was also very big in my high school, is what we used to call new wave, like the Cure—
Mike Montague: A Flock of Seagulls, all that good stuff, but they were rock bands too, if you had to classify them now. People play them on classic rock stations, or in the rock genre.
Mike Montague: But I wanted to circle back to the client thing—we can fight about music if you want—because I wanted to add this point: what I do now, and what I learned from this situation, is I got really clear not only on what not to play, but on what to play. There are different sides to that definition, and when you’re getting clarity, both sides are important. When I DJ weddings, I say, “Hey, bride, is there any song I should definitely not play under any circumstances?” Seventy percent of brides will say the chicken dance. And I’ll say, “Do you know that all the kids and your grandparents are going to be asking for the chicken dance about 45 minutes into this thing? It’s going to happen, you’re going to cave anyway.” Or when I work with clients now, and I’m introducing somebody, I say, “Is there anything you want me to say? Anything you definitely do not want me to say? What do you want included in this project? What do you not?” Getting really clear, because I think what got me was the disco, not the actual songs I was trying to include, or what I was trying to do.
Morgan Friedman: This is a very subtle point that I like—asking both what you want and what you do not want, and in the balance between those two is creativity. That reminds me of a whole other music tangent—my wedding, long ago, in Argentina. I remember the wedding DJ—I explicitly inserted, we had a whole bunch of long, detailed conversations, because I’m a bit picky about music. One of the things I said was, “I want no Spanish-language music.” And it was in Argentina, so he’s like, “Yeah, American music, they know all the songs.” But in the middle of it, a Spanish song came on, and another, and another, and after three songs I went right up to the DJ and was like.
Mike Montague: “What are we doing? We don’t know each other at all.”
Morgan Friedman: Exactly.
Mike Montague: No, I think that’s really important, and what I found is when you get good at it as a professional, you learn how to work that balance. They always talk about this with actors—one for you, one for me. I’ll do a big box-office smash, a cheesy rom-com, but then I’m going to do this artsy foreign film. And I would always try to negotiate with couples and say, “Hey, give me a list of your favorite songs. It’s your night. I want to make sure you and your friends—if you have an inside joke, or you love this weird, esoteric song—I’ll play that for you, especially after midnight, after grandma leaves, and we’ll all go nuts. Whatever you want. We can’t do that while the kids and grandma are still there. Also, you’ve got to give me some room—there might be some songs you don’t like, but if you want everybody else to have fun—I’ve done hundreds of weddings, I know what a great wedding sounds like, I know exactly when to do the Cha Cha Slide, the YMCA, the chicken dance, all that stuff to get people up. But when I got paid in bars, they also want you to play slow songs, and people want a couples’ dance at a wedding, so we’re not going to go all hardcore rock. In bars and clubs, I’d play really bad songs so people would go sit down and buy another drink—I was getting paid by the restaurant, again, know who your customer is. And I’d get these lessons all the time, because the bar would say, “If everybody’s out on the dance floor, they’re not drinking. They don’t have a drink in their hand, and they’re not buying other drinks. People need a chance to go to the bathroom, a chance to buy another drink every 15 minutes. You’ve got to clear the dance floor with a terrible song.” And people wonder, “Why’d you do that? Why would that happen?” Well, that’s it. Number two, I would always get guys who’d come up and say, “Why are you playing all this chick-dance music, like Britney Spears? Play some Metallica, something good.” And I’d say, “Look, I like it as much as you do. That’s all fine, except women will not be out on the dance floor for this. And if the women leave the bar, the guys leave the bar. So we’re going to listen to Britney Spears, and we’re going to watch the girls dance. And if you want to listen to Metallica, you can listen to it on the way home.” Again, know who your customer is, and know the audience of your audience. I can play what the bride wants, or what the bar owner wants, but what they don’t want is for everybody to leave and be sitting there by themselves. So it’s important to get both needs met.
Morgan Friedman: I like that—in business language, it would be “know your stakeholders,” and there are multiple stakeholders of different types.
Mike Montague: Yeah.
Morgan Friedman: In this scenario, there’s the bar owner, there are the people who work at the bar, there are the guys and the girls, and then there’s you, because you need to get your cut too.
Mike Montague: Yeah, you need to get your knees out a little bit.
Morgan Friedman: One hundred percent. And you need to balance all of those together in choosing what song to play next on the playlist.
Mike Montague: In my marketing business, that happens all the time, because clients will say, “I don’t like this website,” or “it should say something like this,” and you’re not the client’s decision-maker at a competing firm—you’re trying to think about yourself, what colors you like, which I can certainly take into account, but what we really want to make sure of is that your buyers like the marketing, not you. So sometimes for me, that means making something ugly. Sometimes for them, it means going slow. Usually people overcomplicate their marketing—they say, “But wait, I know all these crazy features and benefits, these buzzwords and industry terms,” and you say, “Yeah, your buyers don’t care about that. They care whether it solves their problem or not.”
Morgan Friedman: Right. And, by the way, part of my general worldview is that I tend to see everything as a narrative, everything as stories. Until this conversation, I never applied that thought to this—how do you get people excited?—applying it to DJ selecting songs. It’s the same point, because a narrative of great dance song, great dance song, great dance song—even if the songs are all great, it’s like a movie that’s just shoot and fight, shoot and fight, shoot and fight—after a while, you lose everyone. So even with song selections, you need this sort of dance song, then a slow song, then this different type of energy, and so on. So it makes sense that as a professional DJ performing at weddings, you learn the narrative language: first you talk like this, then you play music like this, then like this, and then all together you’ll have a great wedding.
Mike Montague: It’s amazing. That was my favorite part of the job—reading the audience and finding out what story I could tell them with the music. I did everything from a 90-year-old’s birthday party to every type of event you could imagine. And the fun part was knowing there are these energy waves, these story arcs, the up and down.
Morgan Friedman Exactly.
Mike Montague: You want a singalong song, and then maybe a dance-along song, and then ones that are freestyle dance songs, and then other songs that set a genre or a mood, or a funny moment, or a rest break to catch your breath. And DJs who spin and mix music also think about it—you can’t just crash a song that’s 90 beats per minute into one that’s 120. Yes. You’ve got to work your way there. So I’d tell stories, do three or four moves, like a chess move—okay, if I want to g et from this bride’s request, or grandma’s request to dance with her husband, to “Lady in Red,” but I also have this crazy Nelly song, “Country Grammar”—how can I play them both in the same room? It’s not back to back, it’s going to be some sort of mix. I’d try to find ones exactly in the middle: “Country Grammar” has a country beat, “Lady in Red” is slow, with piano. If I go from piano to guitar, I could get to mountain music, or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and then to “Country Grammar,” and I could have these cool moments where everybody’s singing to Alabama or mountain music, and then they go into “Country Grammar,” and it’s awesome. Tying all those pieces of the story together was really fun. That was the coolest part of the job.
Morgan Friedman: I love and appreciate your overintellectualization of what’s next—I do the same thing. Two other comments on your story that might be useful. First, I feel like there’s an interesting backup-plan lesson here. This was pre-internet, and I think it’s hysterical—you came with your pile of CDs. I never really realized DJs used CDs, but of course it made sense—it definitely tells you the era, between vinyl and post-records, but pre-everything-digital. So you made your selection of CDs beforehand and brought them. An interesting thought, in retrospect: there are these edge cases—you think it’s probably going to be like this, but maybe you want to bring, as a backup, some wildly different types. I see this in business all the time, like in design—okay, I really think the various options I give the client match this sort of style, because that’s what they told me, but guess what, sometimes you just want to include outliers and weird examples, and that’s unexpectedly what they really like.
Mike Montague: I love that. Much in that vein of “one for me, one for them”—when I was doing graphic design or marketing plans, I’d do that same thing. I’d say, “Here’s what you’ve asked for. Here’s maybe what I’d do as a professional.” And then, “Here’s one crazy, off-the-wall idea I just had while putting it together”—what if we did this? And oftentimes they’ll pick the crazy idea, or at least respect it, because “nobody else has pitched anything like that, nobody in our market has done anything like that.”
That’s awesome. Every once in a while—you reminded me of this too—in music selection, once I could download songs, I’d play a song in a bar or club that I’d never heard before, and I’d listen to part of it in my ear monitor before playing it. But I’d have to pray that once I hit play, the second half of the song was similar to the first half, and that anybody would know this song. But if a big enough stakeholder said, “Hey, I want you to throw on this new song,” I’d have to download it and think, “All right, we’ll give it a shot and see what happens.” And it might crash, but I could always pivot and get out of there. The hard part with the Billy Idol thing was I couldn’t pivot. There was nowhere to go for success in my collection.
Morgan Friedman: So I think this observation is really two different observations tied together—have a backup plan in case it doesn’t work, but also make sure you have purposely more extreme or diverse options on the ends of the curve, rather than just the middle-50% options, because there are situations where you want them.
Mike Montague: Especially in a world with AI, in my marketing world—AI will hit stuff right down the middle, the 50%.
Morgan Friedman: One hundred percent. I always make the exact same comment about AI. Yeah, you want the utterly average, generic corporate marketing? Just use AI.
Mike Montague: Cranking it out. You had another observation.
Morgan Friedman: The second observation I wanted to make, in your defense, for the choices you made 20 years ago, is that I think I would have likely done the same thing, for an unexpected reason: there’s this basic question of what genre Billy Idol is, and I want to observe his last name—I’m assuming it’s a stage name—his stage last name is Idol. By definition, taking on a stage name of “Idol” says, “I just want to be famous and make lots of money”—the exact opposite of the punk rock, classic rock, “we hate the man, we hate the machine, we just want to make music” version of that genre, at its purest. So by using the name Billy Idol—it’s sort of like American Idol. You go on American Idol because you want to be famous and make lots of money.
Mike Montague: You want to be a god.
Morgan Friedman: Exactly. Not for any sort of integrity as an artist. If you have integrity as an artist, you would never go on American Idol. So just from the name, of course, it’s about fame and money.
Mike Montague: Let’s talk about integrity and art for a minute, because I think you’re going to have some brilliant observations. I had one, in this entertainment world, and in radio: I realized that I sold out immediately. And in a good way—I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be on the radio, I wanted to make money at this. And even in graphic design and marketing, it’s like, well, I’m not a starving artist, I want to get paid to do this. So if somebody’s paying me to do it, I’ve got to make what they want me to make, or I need to get picked by people in order to be able to do this. Otherwise, I have to go the long way around. And I am doing that now with my company, at 45 years old—I have the credibility and cachet to say, “No, I don’t want this project, it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t pay well enough,” or, “They’re not looking to hire me, they’re looking to solve a problem I don’t solve.” So I’m okay saying no to projects. But when I was 20 years old, a DJ trying to be on the radio—I went to the University of Missouri for two years, and our big rival is Kansas, because Kansas City sits right between Kansas and Missouri, and since the Civil War they’ve been fighting it out. My first commercial, which I got paid $100 to read, was for the KU bookstore, Kansas—it was, “We’ve got the cure for what’s ailing you, Jayhawk fever, come on down to the K-Book”—they played the fight song behind me. It was a total sellout. But I had to read a one-minute script five times, and I got $100 in five minutes, and I’d never made any money for voiceover work before. I was like, this is the best. And I realized, it’s not my face on it, I didn’t write the commercial, my job was to read it, and read it in a fun and interesting way. I’m not endorsing the product, any of that—this is what it takes to get paid. And a lot of people at the radio station would turn down adult bookstore ads and other things, and as the night and weekend guy, I was like, I’ll take them all. I’ve got to pay my bills, I’ve got to fill up the gas tank. I’ll read whatever you want me to read until I build up my confidence, my bank of skills, my reputation, and then I’ll hang my hat on more of the jobs I want to do. But I found that just working gave me all of those benefits of experience, and also got me in front of people and opportunities, and allowed me to keep doing it for over 15 years with radio, and now build a whole career out of it with podcasting.
Morgan Friedman: I have two comments on that. First, do you know the old Oscar Wilde joke about asking a woman to have sex with him for £10?
Mike Montague: Oh, I think I do, but tell it again, I don’t remember.
Morgan Friedman: To remind you, and for our listeners who may or may not know it: classic Oscar Wilde line. He meets some aristocratic woman, a super-rich British aristocratic princess, and he says, “Will you have sex with me for £10?” And she says, “No.” “Sorry, sorry, I got it wrong—will you have sex with me for a million pounds?” And she says, “No way.” “Well, will you have sex with me for £10?” And she says, “No, what do you think I am, a prostitute?” And he says, “Well, we’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating on price.”
Mike Montague: Yeah, yeah.
Morgan Friedman: I didn’t tell it smoothly, but you got the punch line. So my first observation is that there’s an interesting insight in that Oscar Wilde line, which is that most human beings can be paid off in this sort of way—it’s just a question of where your price is. And even if we forget about money and think about price in a metaphysical way—okay, I’m not willing to do the porn, well, I’m willing to do the porn but not the gay porn, then someone else says, well, I’m willing to do porn and gay porn and this—it’s all just some sort of continuum, and everyone places themselves somewhere on it, because even if you’re a sellout, there’s something you’re not willing to do.
Mike Montague: I found—you mentioned the reality shows—I auditioned for Big Brother and shows like that, and I didn’t even come close, because the people going on those shows are willing to do anything—fight, scream, get naked, whatever they’ve got to do to be on television and become famous. And I just wasn’t that carefree, even in my 20s.
Morgan Friedman: So my first comment on this question is that it’s all a continuum. Each individual is somewhere on the continuum, and where you happen to land is, for all practical purposes, random. Your life history, your parents’ beliefs, your religion—whatever has happened in your life has led you to a point where you’re okay doing this but not that, while my life experience has put me here.
Mike Montague: So you’ve also got to be aware that it changes over your life and your experience. And that’s the hard part people don’t understand—older people who’d been in the business longer than me would give different advice, one way or the other, depending on where they were on that spectrum—either, “Look, man, if you want to work, you’ve got to pay the bills, you’d better hustle and get out there,” or, “You’ve got to charge more, you’ve got to be picky and choosy and find the right spots.” And it’s like, easy for you to say—you’re already paying the bills, you already made it. Yeah, that’s a great point.
Morgan Friedman: And then my second and final point, and then we’ll wrap up, is another one of my sayings, one I often say to clients, people I work with, because I happen to be an artsy guy myself—I at least see myself that way, and I tend to hire a lot of artsy people—which is: I like to ask, what is the difference between art and marketing? And my answer is, marketing is art plus strategy. What I mean by that is the best marketing is a form of art, no matter what it is—”I want to be famous on TikTok,” whatever—it’s about getting to the bottom of how it works and doing something amazing. It’s incredible how often the really successful marketing is just so freaking good—it’s a form of art, very consistently. If you just do art for art’s sake, you’ll do whatever your heart feels inspired by—”I’m feeling creative about this thing, I really want to play in this genre, I’ll just play in this genre.” Okay. But marketing is where you take that same creative spirit, that same creative energy, and apply strategy to it—”If I apply it this way, I’m feeling really creative, and also, if I apply it this sort of way, millions of people might want to listen to it.” It’s art channeled through strategy. And I think this is a way for artistic people—I see you’re the same way—to think of themselves as real artists and creative in this way, rather than as starving artists, if they can just think about it a little differently and channel it differently. In other words, apply strategy, think a few steps ahead: okay, we have this problem, we need to get millions of people buying this product. How do we do that? Art plus strategy. Don’t just think, “Oh, people will like it if it’s a low price,” etc. No—what is it that people love? Now let’s create the story they’re going to tell about it. That’s what I always think about as scalable storytelling. In marketing, what I do is either shrink it down—what’s this whole story about this product, and how can I put it into one tagline—or take that tagline, that marketing campaign idea, and stretch it out, from one sentence to a 30-second commercial, to an hour-long webinar, to a campaign that’s months long, to years of using the product, client activation, renewals, all of that stuff. It’s stretching and shrinking the story back and forth.
Morgan Friedman: Exactly. And I also think, having the strategy and the artsy side, you need to balance it, because a mistake I’ve seen too many artsy marketer types make is falling in love with your own art. So much A/B testing has taught me that, unfortunately, being too clever in ads often doesn’t work—it just leaves people confused. So that’s part of the strategic decision: we want to be really creative, but if we go too far off in the wild, it’s less likely to work.
A way to say it differently is that art has always worked best under constraints, and often the constraints were technological—you had to paint in a certain way, those were the only materials available, you could only carve into these walls, and under those constraints, you did awesome things. Twitter, only 140 characters. If you think about that a little more metaphorically—business constraints, we need to get these people excited about buying this—it’s like working within these constraints, which is actually an interesting and exciting creative challenge.
Mike Montague: I like to think about it as leverage. You can’t get leverage on a tool unless you have something to push against. You need that boundary, that constraint, to give you leverage. Otherwise, you’re just floating around in zero gravity, with nothing to create leverage for your project. But speaking of constraints, I feel like we’ve stretched this story to the limits.
Mike Montague: Every angle’s been covered—about time to wrap it up.
Morgan Friedman: Mike, this has been so much fun. I love the music tangents, I love getting into the art of how a DJ thinks and applying it to business—so many lessons. Thank you for the time.
Mike Montague: It’s been great getting to know you, Morgan. Thank you so much for having me here. It was a blast, and it went about as I expected, which is great—I had a fun time.
Morgan Friedman: And everyone watching, thank you for staying with us until the very end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we did. Until next time.
